[Dialogue] 4/21/11: Exploring the Story of the Cross, Part VII - What Judas Iscariot Meant in the Eighth Ninth & Tenth Decades of Christian Development

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Exploring the Story of the Cross, Part VII - What Judas Iscariot Meant in the Eighth Ninth & Tenth Decades of Christian Development
Last week we began a biblical analysis of Judas Iscariot.  First, we noted that Paul, who wrote and died before any gospel had been written, was totally unaware of the tradition that one of the “twelve” played the role of the traitor.  Not only is there no mention of this when Paul wrote the account of Jesus being “handed over,” but also when Paul described the experience of resurrection on “the third day,” he said that Jesus was seen by the “twelve.”  Judas is still among them, a fact that would have been inconceivable if he had been the traitor.  Next we looked at how the Judas story, introduced into the Christian narrative by Mark, the first gospel writer somewhere between the years 70-72, grew and developed as new details were added when each successive gospel was written, until the Fourth gospel completed the New Testament’ Judas  portrait somewhere between the years 95-100.  Finally, we took those developing gospel details and, guided by them, began a search of the Hebrew Scriptures for other tales of traitors to see if in those Jewish sources any of the things said later about Judas were present.  We discovered that every single detail in the New Testament’s account of Judas could be accounted for in this manner.  This suggests that the story of Judas is not that of a person of history, but of a mythological creation.
One other detail that needs to be noted is that while Judas, the symbol of the Jewish nation, grows darker and more sinister as each successive gospel is composed, Pontius Pilate, the symbol of the Roman authorities, grows more and more benevolent. Pilate is portrayed as struggling to have Jesus released, offering Barabbas in exchange, washing his hands publicly and announcing that “I find no fault in him.”  Keep in mind that the gospels were written 40-70 years after the crucifixion.  They are not eye witness accounts, but interpretive portraits and we must not pretend that they are describing things that actually happened; they are seeking to interpret what the death of Jesus meant and to find in it the salvation purpose that they assumed his death accomplished.  With that in mind, it is also essential to be cognizant of the history of that time and to embrace the context in which the gospels were composed and how the story of a traitor named Judas might have emerged.
The Jewish people were conquered by the Roman Empire about 65 years before the birth of Jesus, thus breaking the oppression of the Syrians and beginning the period of oppression at the hands of the Romans.  As a conquered people the Jews displayed the entire gamut of responses that subjugated people always display: some sought to cooperate with their conquerors, some endured this oppression passively and some resisted in every way they could.  The general population of Jews admired these resisters calling them “freedom fighters.”  The Romans on the other hand regarded them as “terrorists.”  In fact these rebellious Jews tended to organize themselves as guerrilla warriors and set up camp in the natural hideouts of the hills of Galilee to harass their conquerors with a series of hit and run attacks. From these hiding places they would swoop out on small contingents of Roman soldiers, destroy them and then fade back into those hills.  They were a nuisance to the Romans, but a costly nuisance.
Emboldened by their guerrilla successes, these “patriots,” who were also known as “the Zealots,” decided in 66 AD that they were sufficiently strong to attack the Romans directly and to drive them out, thus securing Jewish freedom once again. So they began activities that looked more and more like general warfare and less and less and less like sporadic guerrilla tactics.  It was a military gamble that in retrospect proved to be quite foolish.  The Romans responded with maximum force and began to neutralize the Galilean hills, but they were unable to destroy the guerrilla bands since moving a heavily-armed Roman force into those hills was all but impossible.  When the hostilities escalated, however, the Romans under a commander named Vespasian decided that they had to attack and destroy the heart of the Jewish nation.  The Galilean guerrillas could not continue without support from Judea and Jerusalem.  So invading Judea with a powerful military force, the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and in the year 70 CE, breached the walls, cracked the defense perimeter and moved into the Jewish capital city.  The Romans went through Jerusalem in that year like the Russians went through Berlin in 1945.  Not one stone was left on another.  When the smoke of battle cleared, the nation of Judea no longer existed, the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Temple had been razed to the ground as all Jewish resistance was crushed.  Those who managed to escape retreated into the desert to a fortress named Masada, where they held out until the year 73 when they too were finally destroyed.  Josephus, a Jewish historian, tells us that the defenders at Masada, knowing that if they were captured alive death by crucifixion awaited them, engaged in an act of mass suicide until not a Jewish soldier was still alive when the Romans finally entered the fort.
This war unleashed enormous hostility on the part of the Romans toward all Jews for having brought this war upon themselves and upon Rome.  Within the Jewish community the members of the Orthodox party, who controlled the worship of the Temple and who had in fact supported the guerrilla fighters, were held particularly responsible for bringing this disaster upon the Jewish nation. The Roman authorities, however, did not distinguish one Jew from another. Revisionist Jews, a category that at that time included the disciples of Jesus who were called not Christians but the “Followers of the Way,” sought to find a way to separate themselves from the Orthodox Party for the sake of their own survival, lest they be tarred with the same brush with which all Jews were being tarred by the Romans.  How better to do that than to make the villain of the Jesus story someone who bore the name of the Jewish nation by shifting the responsibility for the death of Jesus away from the Roman officials, who alone had the power to execute, and to portray the Romans as crucifying Jesus, but only under pressure from the Orthodox Party of the High Priest and Sadducees.  This meant that the same people who had been responsible for the war against Rome were now said to have been also responsible for the death of the founder of their own movement.
They would thus portray Jesus not as a revolutionary – “My kingdom is not of this world,” – and at the same time portray Pilate, the Roman governor, in increasingly benevolent terms seeking to set Jesus free.  The principle these “Followers of the Way” were trying to establish was that “if your enemy is also my enemy then we should be friends.”  To frame the Jesus story as an act of betrayal by the Orthodox party of the Jews accomplished these goals.  So Matthew’s gospel can portray Pilate as seeking Jesus’ release but being thwarted seeking to remove his guilt by announcing: “I am innocent of the blood of this just man.” At the same time characterizing the Jews as a “mob” at the foot of the cross, saying words that would fuel anti-Semitism through the centuries: “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”  This group thus began a process of separating the followers of Jesus from the Jews that ultimately resulted in the “Followers of the Way” being excommunicated from the synagogues around the year 88 CE and pushing Christianity rapidly into becoming a Gentile movement. Ultimately they sought to deny the Jewish womb that had given them birth.
Soon fierce hostility toward the Jews became a primary mark of Christianity and its intensity grew in the first centuries of Christian history.  The Church Fathers, Polycarp, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom and Jerome, among many others, filled their writings with a blood-curdling anti-Semitism.  To them the Jews were “vermin unfit for life” and “Christ-Killers.”  Forced conversions, the kidnapping and subsequent baptizing of Jewish babies enabled them to use a law prohibiting a Christian child from being raised by “infidels,” to make legal the separation of Jewish children from their parents.  Good Friday became a day of peril for Jews as Christian emerged from their churches and cathedrals filled with wrath for what “the Jews had done to Jesus” and seeking revenge by beating Jews, destroying Jewish property and sometimes killing Jews.  The Crusades were filled with anti-Semitism – so was the Inquisition – Martin Luther added fuel to the fires of hatred with his diatribes against Jews and his call for the burning of synagogues.  The Holocaust was the final incredible explosion of the anti-Semitism poured into the blood stream of Western civilization by Christian people.  It all began I now believe when out of their need to survive the hostility of the Romans following the Jewish-Roman war the Christians created the character of Judas making him the quintessential Jew and using him to shift the blame for the death of Jesus away from the Romans, where it surely belonged, and onto the Jews, which allowed Christians to justify their anti-Semitism for centuries.
The stereotype of a Jew from the character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” to the images of Jewish people as money grubbing bankers is all derived from the portrait of Judas who would do anything for money.  Because Jews were not allowed in Christian Europe to own any land, they became bankers and jewelers and in the process this anything-for-money reputation was enhanced.
The facts are that Jesus was put to death by the Romans, but his death was blamed on the Jews for political reasons.  Judas was the vehicle for accomplishing this.  It is never too late to roll the prejudices of ages back.  It is never too late for Christians to bow in apology before our Jewish brothers and sisters and to beg forgiveness.  It is never too late to be vigilant against anti-Semitism whenever it lifts its ugly head.  As we come to observe Good Friday this year in the name of the Jewish Jesus, I invite my fellow Christians to join me in doing just that.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Adam Boyette via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am a Methodist fan of yours in Fort Worth, Texas. I first became acquainted with your work in my Sunday School class about three years ago. I was astounded and relieved to find that someone else, a retired bishop no less, shared my doubts about the literal, supernatural claims of the Bible, and even further that this person could claim to be a Christian. 

I read your book Why Christianity Must Change or Die and thoroughly enjoyed it. My wife is currently reading another of your books A New Christianity for a New World. On page 15 of this book, you describe an encounter with “an iconoclastic journalist who identified himself as an Atheist.” You and he were both panel members on a television program in London and he was well prepared to combat the old fashioned Christian God, but not the new line of Christianity you advocate. This sure sounds like Christopher Hitchens. Is it in fact? Could you provide some more information about the television program? 

I have read your comments that of course the angry vengeful God that Hitchens writes about is not great. I rather like these debates between Hitchens and Christian apologists but unfortunately the ones I’ve seen cling to the old Theistic God that Hitchens so eagerly argues against. I would love to learn more about your encounter with him (or whoever this person may be) since you argue so strongly for a God so different from that old vengeful one. 






Answer:
Dear Adam, 

Glad to have a fan in Fort Worth! 

Yes, that journalist was Christopher Hitchens. The program was maybe ten years ago and I think it was a produced and was shown on Independent Television of London (ITV), but I am not sure. It went on for two hours. There were two other participants on the program, one of whom was Karen Armstrong. 

Christopher Hitchens is not a well man today, but I think he has been good for the Christian Church and we need to respond to him not with unthinking personal attacks, but with honesty and appreciation. He is telling us how the way we understand and project Christianity today is inadequate. It is filled with the distortions of a pre-modern mindset and complicated by a literal understanding of the Bible that for many it is no longer anything but negative. 

Christopher is not an easy person to whom to relate. He comes across as perpetually angry, almost cynical. He projects an arrogance that assumes that he possesses the entire truth, very much like those who claim that the Pope is infallible or the Bible is inerrant do. For a dinner guest or even a debating partner, I much prefer Richard Dawkins! 

~John Shelby Spong 





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